I Guess It’s Worth Noting They’re Ending Uncanny X-Men

There are various reports out there that Marvel is ending its Uncanny X-Men title as part of a new storyline based around a conflict between the Cyclops and Wolverine characters. In other words, it's a strategic publishing move rather than a "this comic is dead-dead-dead" move. This is such a common strategy these days that DC is doing it 52 times this September, including the renumbering of titles that have a longer and more important overall historical pedigree than Marvel's primary mutant title. Still, there's something about the loss of one of the longtime flagship mainstream titles that bears noting. Uncanny X-Men officially took on that title from the original X-Men (they were still uncanny, just not in-the-official-title uncanny) almost right at the end of the John Byrne-on-art-chores run in 1981; a comic called X-Men was latter added to Marvel's roster during the high moment of the speculation craze.

There was a time right before and right after its initial re-naming that the X-Men/Uncanny X-Men series was maybe the most important title in comics: a hardcore fan favorite for a lot of kids and teens reading in the late 1970s and early 1980s that would go on to a life of reading and even working in comics, a crucial item of focused interest at a moment when there weren't a lot of great comics widely available, a comic where issues from just a few years earlier spiked in perceived collectible value in a way that ended a lot of arguments as to why Junior was still reading funnybooks. I know that it was the series brought me back to reading comics again after having grown bored with them as a smaller child; I have no idea what the shape of my life might be like if that series hadn't been published. That particular run was also directly influential, both on the higher-selling X-Men comics to come in the '80s and into the '90s and in providing maybe a half-dozen of the, say, two dozen basic plotlines used in superhero comics even today.
 
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